Investigating Ivy

This qualitative study examined how race and class shaped the college choice process and collegiate experiences of Black undergraduates attending Ivy League Institutions. Findings revealed that although social class did not play a significant role in participants’ college choice process, robust financial aid packaging significantly impacted their decision to attend a highly selective university. Racial identity was largely viewed by participants as a vehicle to admit more Black Immigrant students than Black Native students in order to achieve institutional diversity/affirmative action goals. Prevalent racialized incidents and institutional racism shaped participants’ collegiate experiences. The findings of this study are expected to have implications for minority recruitment, college choice, access and equity, as well as higher education diversity initiatives.

Institutional Diversity of Transferring Land Development Rights in China—Cases from Zhejiang, Hubei, and Sichuan

With the continuous urbanization, China is facing a dilemma of achieving two conflicting targets in land governance, i.e., the continuous supply of urban construction land to support urbanization and the preservation of cultivated land for food security. Under China’s dual land system, the implementation of the “Linkage between Urban-land Taking and Rural-land Giving” (Linkage) policy is of great significance in promoting more inclusive urbanization by commodifying the land development right and connecting urban and rural land markets. In the specific land property right system and changing land governance of China, this policy appears to provide an opportunity for stakeholders other than the state to compete for the value from the transfer of development rights (TDR) and triggers the emergence of diversified approaches in organizing land projects in rural China. Based on the theoretical perspective of New Institutional Economics and empirical evidence from Zhejiang Province, Hubei Province, and Sichuan Province, this paper conducts a comparative institutional analysis for China’s TDR practice and argues that the diversified operational approaches in China’s practice have aligned various interests of the stakeholders through flexible participation methods and elaborate reallocation of land property rights, in order to fit various institutional environments and material conditions

Latinx Communities and Academic Trajectories

This chapter will focus on why the Latina experience is critical to understanding current efforts to diversify the academy in the United States. We discuss the demographic realities of Latinx representation in higher education, the various ways in which Latinx scholars are marginalized, and what’s currently known about “best practices” when seeking excellence and inclusion through institutional diversity. We stress the importance of intersectionality in understanding and addressing the underrepresentation of Latina scholars in STEM.

We are all institutionalized: Three works to challenge the conceit of a generically ‘academic’ study of religion

This essay encounters and considers together three very different recent works by scholars of religion, each one with strong Canadian connections: Maureen Matthews, Aaron Hughes and Donald Wiebe. The primary purpose, however, is to illuminate more broadly the importance of institutional dynamics in the formation and operation of the academic study of religion (i.e., not just in Canada). This stands in contrast to a well-established pattern of debating supposedly loftier questions of naming, disciplinary identity, idealized mandates and limits, etc. Furthermore, this essay suggests that scale of investigation matters – with a local, single-institution study revealing more, perhaps, about how we really do our work than either national or transnational efforts. In the end, reading these three books together suggests a tremendous diversity, including dynamic institutional diversity, in academic approaches to religion: scientific and non-scientific (predictably) but also, disciplined or expert and non-expert or academic administrative. Thus, the essay enjoins readers to take seriously a distinction between domains of ‘distributive’ and ‘concentrated’ expertise within the academy (e.g., Religious Studies versus, say, Civil Engineering), as well as the development of patterns of ‘altero-piety’ across the expert/nonexpert divide. In the end, such murky institutional dynamics appear to be shaping and impelling our field from the local institutional level (e.g., at the University of Winnipeg as documented by Matthews) to the transnational institutional level (e.g., in the International Association for the History of Religions as documented by Wiebe). Ultimately, one must conclude that stipulating that Religious Studies entail the academic study of religion is meaningless. ‘The academy’ is no more universal and unique ( sui generis?) than ‘religion’ itself. Rather, academic institutions are diverse and particular; and yet a variety of factors, ranging from deep colonial histories to the current global political economy of postsecondary higher education, all work to conceal the importance of the institutional basis of Religious Studies. Put another way (and pace Jonathan Z Smith): religion certainly is a creation of the scholar’s study – yet, far from imagining this scholar’s study as a place set apart (as it were), we must start imagining it as a historical, social and institutional location. That would take us one small but further step towards the all-important goal of disciplinary ‘reflexivity”.

The Institutional Grammar: A Method for Coding Institutions and its Potential for Advancing Third Sector Research

Institutions—defined as strategies, norms and rules (Ostrom Understanding institutional diversity, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005)—are omnipresent in third sector contexts. In this paper, we present the Institutional Grammar (IG) as a theoretically informed approach to support institutional analysis in third sector research. More specifically, the IG coding syntax allows the researcher to systematically wade through rich text and (transcribed) spoken language to identify and dissect institutional statements into finer syntactical segments of interest to the researcher. It is a versatile method that can generate data for small- or large-N research projects and can be integrated with mixed-method research designs. After first introducing and describing the IG, we present a case study to illustrate how a IG-based syntactic analysis can be leveraged to inform third sector research. In the case, we ask: Do the rules embedded in regulatory text addressing the involuntary dissolution of charity organizations differ between bifurcated and unitary jurisdictions in the United States? Using IG’s ABDICO 2.0 syntax, we identify eleven “Activation Condition” (AC) categories that trigger action and assess variation among the 46 jurisdictions. We ultimately conclude that the rules do not differ between bifurcated and unitary jurisdictions, but that finding is not the primary concern. The case demonstrates IG as an important methodological advance that yields granular, structured analyses of rules, norms and strategies in third sector settings that may be difficult to identify with other methods. We then emphasize four areas of third sector research that could benefit from the addition of IG-based methods: analysis of (1) rule compliance, (2) inter-organizational collaboration, (3) comparative study of institutional design, and (4) the study of institutional change. We close the paper with some reflections on where IG-based analysis is headed.

Education for a Sustainable Future: Strategies for Holistic Global Competence Development at Engineering Institutions

Higher education institutions (HEIs) must ensure that their graduates possess not only professional know-how, but also the global competence to address the challenges posed in the UN’s 2030 Agenda. This is especially relevant in engineering education, which plays an important role in sustainable development. These competencies are typically thought to be developed in relation to institutions’ internationalisation efforts, but reports on how this is supposed to happen are often vague or built on wishful thinking. In this article, we describe a mixed-methods investigation into how holistic global competence development as a crucial aspect of sustainable education can be systematically enhanced in higher engineering education. Following a design-based research approach, connecting theoretical and practical insights from experts and stakeholders, we present here four dimensions of such an approach. Firstly, we discuss the setup, contents, and implementation of institutional guidelines as the crucial starting point of any internationalisation strategy aiming at integrating sustainable development education and global competence development. Secondly, we stress the role of institutional diversity, and show how institutions can foster inclusive and welcoming environments. Thirdly, we suggest strategies and approaches for global competence training for students, faculty, and staff, and highlight important background considerations for enabling global competence development. Fourthly, we emphasise the importance of assessing efforts to ensure that they live up to their potential and deliver the desired outcomes. The recommendations based on the investigation summarise key considerations that all HEIs—not just those focused on engineering education—must take into account as they strive for holistic global competence development, which is a key aspect of education for sustainable development.

Three-Dimensional Assessment of the Knowledge Production System: Region-City-Organization

Conceptualization of the region as an integral territorial system of knowledge production has formed a widely used research strategy for innovation studies within regional boundaries. Regional level studies are supported by detailed innovation statistics, which is unavailable for smaller administrative-territorial units, such as municipalities or settlements. The development of spatial scientometrics gave impetus for a new round of research on knowledge and innovation geography with a closer approximation in the context of cities and urban agglomerations. The scope of recent research also includes individual organizations that generate new knowledge or innovation. Despite the topic prominence, the entire array of studies is fragmented, and connections between different levels are not established: region – city – organization. Whereas this is critically important for the implementation of an effective innovation policy. In this regard, in this study, we test the hypothesis that the aggregate data obscures a wide variety of knowledge nodes, which are represented by a dominant knowledge centre. In the case of the region, such centres are often the largest cities, and in the case of cities – the largest organizations. The research design is focused on assessing the knowledge production at a multiscale level – organization, city and region, using the method of spatial scientometrics. The example of the Russian Federation illustrates well the territorial and institutional diversity in the distribution of knowledge production centres of different levels due to its great length and complexity of the structure of the national innovation system. This fact determines the high degree of heterogeneity of the Russian innovation space at the interregional, intercity and inter-organizational levels. The research results show a strong correlation between the knowledge profiles of regions and their primary knowledge-generating cities (KGCs). In cases of a strong central-peripheral structure of the regional knowledge production system, the regional profile completely coincides with the profile of its primary KGC. The knowledge capacity of second-tier cities remains hidden. At the city level, the identified trend is exacerbated. The absence of a pronounced leader among knowledge-intensive organizations (KIOs) against organizational diversity leads to a strong blur of the effectiveness of the knowledge production capabilities of a city. The example of Khabarovsk shows that the research profile of a city in a given situation may not repeat the most productive KIO, but, on the contrary, a weak one. Thus, the three-dimensional region-city-organization approach captures local specifics and organizational diversity, encompassing the entire set of elements of a regional knowledge production system. The study concludes with recommendations for a knowledge management policy at a tiered level.